


how to disappear completely

by downpours



Series: projecting my issues onto klaus hargreeves [6]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Drug Addiction, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Klaus Hargreeves Whump, Klaus Hargreeves-centric, Pre-Canon, Suicidal Thoughts, Underage Drug Use, no beta we die like ben
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-04
Updated: 2020-12-04
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:14:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27872129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/downpours/pseuds/downpours
Summary: The first time Klaus crushed up a pill, it was with the blunt edge of a pocketknife on a Krav Maga textbook, which felt a bit like a violent omen.It was a snow that burned like fire.
Series: projecting my issues onto klaus hargreeves [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1980548
Comments: 4
Kudos: 41





	how to disappear completely

**Author's Note:**

> read tags for trigger warnings!
> 
> title from the song by radiohead

Klaus felt a sober clarity when he first crossed the line between swallowing substances and snorting them. (He’d feel it again when he started shooting them.) It was one of those moments he knew would haunt him, but he didn’t care.

The first time he crushed up a pill, it was with the blunt edge of a pocketknife on a Krav Maga textbook, which felt a bit like a violent omen. The crushing littered the leather cover with pill-shaped indents. It felt like catharsis, defiling something of his father’s with the poison he so despised. With careful fingers, he cut the newly-powdered crystals into lines using the edge of his fake ID. He raked the snowy crumbs into clean single-file lines, wanting it to be perfect. Or maybe he was just hesitating. He knew this shit was dangerous.

His siblings would be surprised if they truly knew how every risk Klaus took was calculated. He really wasn’t stupid; he was just desperate to feel okay.

All the Hargreeves siblings received the same education, as unorthodox as it was. Pogo taught them all how to recognize the dangers of different administered drugs because some creeps during missions had tried to subdue them before. (Klaus was a little jealous that he was never the target of the horse tranquilizers.) He knew that snorting drugs was dangerous because it bypassed the body’s metabolism process and shot the chemicals straight into the bloodstream, but he didn’t care about that so much. If Klaus was honest, he cared more about how repeated nasal drug use could cause a deviated septum, because he was not about to be the one-night-stand that snored like an elephant.

So, maybe he was nervous.

But it was as intimidating as it was exciting. He was—no pun intended—crossing a line. And Klaus knew it; his hedonistic behavior was no longer just a party-fuelled teenage shenanigan. This wasn’t shotgunning a beer to impress Diego. This wasn’t clearing his third bong rip in a row to fully appreciate a Pink Floyd album. 

This was the deadly coping mechanism of a lonely kid in his lonely room. 

Klaus set up the lines alone because he knew that anybody who gave a shit about him would try to stop him (although the list of people who gave a shit about him was dwindling along with his father’s liquor supply).

He stared down the twin lines with a desperate sort of melancholy. It wasn’t like the scenes he saw in the movies. It was an unromantic, boring, paralyzing type of sadness.

When he rolled the dollar bill between his fingers, they were still. Absolutely still. It was an odd feeling for someone who had felt like they’d been running since they were eight. He held his breath, mind empty with yearning. It felt like a holy act. Like his fingers were thumbing through bible pages instead of rolling a snuff straw. It was a little biblical, the way he knew he’d see God if he went too far. It wasn’t like the times he drank more than he intended to at parties. It was a Hail Mary. A “Last Exit for 20 Miles” sign on the interstate to death.

Klaus stuck up the bill in his nose with an awkward motion. It poked his naval cavity, and he felt like he had no idea what he was doing. He swallowed his doubt and inhaled the line like it was life support.

It was a snow that burned like fire.

His heart skipped a beat, partly from pain and partly from pleasure. Fingers shot up to his nose as he sniffed so hard he couldn’t breathe. His green eyes watered in a way that didn’t make him want to sob. He slouched against his bed frame, his curl-mopped head shooting up to face the ceiling. And, wow. The stucco of his ceiling looked like stars, and he was stargazing. His head floated with the restless grace of a hummingbird. The room orbited around him.

He felt like God.

“Fuck you, little girl,” sniffed Klaus, “I  _ am _ God.”

It was funny how he felt warmer than he had ever felt in the arms of anyone who claimed they loved him. Because their love was conditional—”are you high, Klaus?” and “go sleep it off alone”—but this feeling? It would warm him even when there was nothing left of him to love. Even when he disappointed himself and everyone around him, he could curl up in the ever-loving embrace of a high. He could feel wanted even when he wasn’t. The pills wouldn’t judge him.

The medium would do anything to feel like this forever.

On this ordinary Tuesday night, he finally felt worthy of the “junkie” title his siblings gave him since he smoked weed. And fuck them if they blamed him, the ignorant  _ bitches _ .

When Klaus discovered that morphine killed the ghosts, he decided that he loved drugs. Soon after, he discovered that he didn’t even need the hard shit to kill the ghosts. The right amount of weed and liquor would dull the apparitions to a tolerable haze. But, even when he had the brief relief of being unhaunted, he still felt haunted in a different way. So he sought out more, more, more, until he could feel _less_.

Technically, Klaus was still a kid. But he had felt years beyond his age since he was eight. His childhood stopped in the mausoleum. Back when he was a kid, an  _ actual  _ kid, he thought that he would be normal if he didn’t see the ghosts. It was a bittersweet feeling when the morphine numbed the ghosts and he still felt haunted.

The pretty pills killed the ghost that he felt inside of him when he was sober. 

His siblings said that the drugs made him dumb. But they didn’t, really, they just allowed him to think without wanting to cut off the blood flow to his brain. Maybe he couldn’t translate the thoughts he had when he was high, but it didn’t make them invalid. To an outsider, his slumping form on the bedroom floor looked half-dead. But as he stargazed at the nothing on his ceiling, he never felt more clear in the head. 

Klaus was so tired of running.

When he first started drinking, before they could label him as a junkie and still saw him as a brother, the common response was:

“But aren’t you worried it’ll hurt you?”

When they said “hurt you”, the “hurt your powers” was silent.

Normally, he deflected this question with the typical “I’m here for a good time, not a long time”. It was easier than answering truthfully: that the reason he first started experimenting with drugs recreationally was when he thought he’d rather die than live sober.

Klaus quickly learned that people who have never tried drugs tend to think people use out of stupidity. There may be some truth to that, but he thought it was stupid they didn’t realize that the people who decide to take a mind-altering substance were people trying to escape something sober. The implications of taking a “mind-altering substance” were in the goddamn name.

And isn’t that a funny debate? Trying to weigh whether or not he deserved to get high? It could’ve been any one of his siblings if they were as desperate to feel okay as he was.

Klaus blinked at the ceiling and looked down. The headrush had lessened from an orgasmic pulse to more of a dull daze. He sniffed, but there was nothing left in his nose but snot. That was a shame. In the background, he could hear his siblings living on without him, as they had grown accustomed to. Vanya played some beautiful classical number. Diego laughed at something Mom had said. Luther and Allison giggled chastely in her room. Ben and Five fought over some academic topic he had no interest in.

And Klaus was alone with his pills and useless brain.

Half of him wished someone would stop him. It wasn’t too late. But he knew they wouldn’t, because he was high, and that alone was an insult to the image of the Academy. They thought he  _ chose  _ to throw his life away--like it wasn’t already day-old garbage from the moment he was born.

So he crushed the next pill with a murderous fervor.  _ Snap!  _ He cut the line like the throats he was taught to. He wasn’t an angry person, but he’d murder his body to feel okay. If he spent the rest of his life chasing this silence, then so be it.

Klaus snorted the next line like it was his last meal. The chemical tumbled down his throat like a barbed wire, but it was okay because he was so high it felt less like a burn and more of a pinprick. His trembling fingers reached for a cigarette to light. Combining headrushes was the only thing that made him feel alive anymore.  _ Flick.  _ He sucked down the smoke and sunk further inside his body. The smoke irritated the chemicals in his throat and he felt a little like he just swallowed bleach, but he didn’t stop. 

He felt liquid-smooth: tears in his eyes, snot dripping from his nose.

**Author's Note:**

> someone call my psychiatrist whenever I update this series Jesus Christ


End file.
